Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  The telephone was ringing. Nearly midnight, and the telephone was ringing.

  For a moment Julia experienced a hallucination. It was Boris calling. Who else? Boris finally had his report on what was going on in the Landing, the truck had missed him, he was still alive.

  Hand shaking, she lifted the receiver. All right, then, it was Lemaster, she told herself. Lemaster, calling from East Podunk, or wherever he was spending the night, glad-handing and raising money. Some friend of Vanessa’s, figuring that, with the storm in tomorrow’s forecast, there was probably no school. Or one of the boys, calling to talk about plans for Christmas.

  Wrong again.

  “Julia, hi, this is Bruce Vallely. Sorry to call so late. You might not remember me, but my wife, Grace, was a member of Ladybugs.”

  “Of course I remember, don’t be silly,” said Julia, surprised to hear his leisurely, confident voice. Bruce was director of campus safety and, presumably, trying to reach Lemaster. Guessing that the late call meant a further helping of bad news, she drew the front of her tattered robe together in an unconsciously protective gesture, and made a mental check of the location of each of her loved ones. “Grace was such a lovely woman. I adored her. I’m so sorry.” But they had been through this part before, at the funeral a year ago, and neither one of them really wanted to do it again. Presumably this was about Boris Gibbs. So Julia said, “Bruce, if you’re looking for Lemaster, he’s down in Miami, at—”

  “I’m not, Julia. Actually, it’s you I’d like to talk to.” Bruce was a throwback to an earlier generation of men of the darker nation, cautious and slow-spoken. Every sentence out of his mouth seemed months in gestation. She suspected that it made people think he was not particularly bright, because American culture rewards mostly speed, as in the mania for standardized tests—which Julia entirely hated. She also suspected that Bruce Vallely was smarter than people thought. “Let me assure you, everything is fine. No emergency. But I wonder whether there is a time tomorrow when I might drive out to see you.”

  “You mean out here? To the Landing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I’m right at the div school—”

  “I know where you work, Julia. But I think it would be better if we had our conversation away from prying eyes.”

  Prying eyes? “I get home about three—”

  “If it’s all right with you, I think it would be better if I didn’t come to the house. We should meet somewhere else.”

  Julia blinked. But Bruce was a serious man, perhaps overly so. Whatever he said, he meant quite literally. “Bruce, what is this? What’s going on?”

  “It’s about Kellen Zant, Julia. It’s important, and…it involves you.”

  “What about me?”

  That wait again. “I’d rather explain tomorrow. I don’t want to bias you.”

  He wants to know about my broken lampposts. About the mirrors. About the surplus and the inventory risk.

  Bruce named a tavern he knew on Route 48, just outside the town limits, and Julia, dazed, said she would meet him there on her way home from Kepler.

  Upstairs, later, as cold December rain lashed the windows, Julia struggled to find a position that would enable her to sleep, but it was spiritual not physical discomfort that was keeping her awake. Alone and worried, she tossed and turned, puzzling over those final words. Bias her about what? Bruce was the sort of man who had a good reason for everything he did, so she supposed he must have one now. Yet the uneasy truth remained: although he had been Grace’s husband, and Grace was an absolute dear, Julia did not know Bruce very well, and did not really like him. Maybe because he scared her. Before assuming his campus post, he had been a senior city detective. One day he and his partner were sent to pick up an accused serial child molester. There was a fumble, never fully explained, and Bruce wound up going into the house alone. The suspect wound up dead, resisting arrest, although he was unarmed. Bruce Vallely had broken the man’s neck. For this act of heroism he received a medal. The following January, on the occasion of the State of the Union message, he was invited to sit in the President’s box.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SECRETARY

  (I)

  WHAT BRUCE VALLELY HATED MOST about his job was being summoned, and the director of campus safety tended to be summoned a lot. By the provost. By the dean of students. By the city police commissioner, wanting to work out a better liaison procedure with his old buddy Bruce, even though, if we tell the truth and shame the devil, the commissioner had hated him when they worked in the same building. By the endless campus committees to which, ex officio, he reported. Then there were the truly terrible days when it fell to Bruce, in his official capacity, to notify parents, spouses, siblings—I wish I had better news for you, but your daughter was at a frat party last night and it seems that…—and he would listen to the screams, the tears, the recriminations, and wonder why exactly he had not retired down south, the way Grace always said they should, when he left the force.

  All of those days were bad. But worst of all was a day like the Tuesday following the murder of Professor Kellen Zant, two weeks and six days before he would make his oblique approach to Julia Carlyle. Because on that Tuesday Bruce Vallely was summoned by the secretary of the university, a fussy little old-schooler whose bald pink pate shone in the flat whiteness of the chandeliers, who seemed to whisper all the time, especially when he was at a great distance, and who happened to be the titular boss of the director of campus safety in the chain of command, although, as a matter of daily practice, Bruce reported mainly to the vice-president for campus affairs, and through her to the new president, Lemaster Carlyle, whom he had met half a dozen times and wholly despised.

  But today was the secretary’s day, and the meeting was on the secretary’s turf.

  That meant the Admin Quad, as the maps called it, a place into which Bruce hated to venture even on festive occasions, let alone days like this one. The university administration spread over three sepulchral buildings, tile-roofed and marble-faced, at the southern end of the campus, as well as endless floors of rented space downtown. The downtown spaces were in two of the city’s several underused office towers, leased at a deep discount, so that the university was able to trumpet proudly yet another investment in the community and, at the same time, save money. The prestige was having an office in one of the mausoleums, which is what they looked like with their marble steps and columns and cornices, fluted windows on the sides, and wrought-iron double doors that looked likely to weigh about three tons each, and probably did. The largest of the three mausoleums, at the south point of the compass, was Marshall Lombard Hall, where the president, the provost, and the secretary, technically the three most senior functionaries at the university, had their offices. As in so many public buildings of the period, the marble front steps were a little too deep to allow one to hurry. Climbing slowly, Bruce assumed that today’s summons was related to the murder of Kellen Zant. The university, he had heard from old friends on the force, was exerting enormous pressure on the authorities to solve the killing of one of its own. In the town of Elm Harbor and its suburbs, the amount of pressure the university was able to exert was quite a lot.

  He was right—but not in the way he thought.

  (II)

  THE SUITE OF ROOMS occupied by the secretary of the university was on the second floor of Lombard Hall and occupied most of the back. His eight broad windows—his because no secretary had ever been other than male—offered a magnificent view over Harbor Park and, in the architect’s original conception, down to the water beyond, although now one saw only the commercial buildings that, from the highway, formed most of the city’s skyline. Bruce supposed there must be some sort of message in that, but he was not a man for metaphor. He liked words that had meaning, questions that had answers, and people who refused to offer five different reasons why good was no better than evil.

  “I’m afraid we have a bit of a crisis on our hands,” the secretary murmured from
the far side of the polished desk left over from the old days, too big for serious work, but just the right size to let underlings know just how far under they linged. The walls were covered in soft green fabric, the university’s color. Lighted sconces illuminated disapproving portraits of the great dead white males who over the years had run the place.

  “I’m happy to help,” said Bruce, because Grace had warned him before she died to try to be more polite, especially to those who controlled his budget, and his salary. Remember, you won’t have me to clean up your messes any more, Lee—which nobody else ever called him, nor did she when anybody was around, a play on his surname as well as an homage to the kung fu films that had fascinated him in the early years of their perfect marriage.

  “Are you, then?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Community’s up in arms. Usual suspects, preaching about racism and how the university is the font of all evil and I don’t know what all. People tell me it’s a bit of a tinderbox sort of thing, what with Professor Zant being black and so forth.”

  “Just tell me what you need,” Bruce enthused, hoping he sounded sincere, because the job was one he wanted to keep. He was no fool. He knew what part his skin color played. His hiring had been announced with great fanfare after the previous director had resigned under pressure following a series of racial incidents involving the campus police. Probably the most egregious—certainly the one the newspapers liked best—had come almost two years ago, when a black professor had been mugged in the middle of the campus, and the officers who responded let the white muggers escape while holding their guns on the professor. His predecessor was finished after that, and Bruce Vallely got the job. Grace, still the picture of robust good health, had been delighted. He earned almost twice what he had made working for the city, and the benefits were astonishing. If keeping all of that meant occasionally toadying up to the likes of the secretary, then he would do it. “You know you can count on me.”

  The secretary arched his gruff, graying eyebrows just enough to tell his guest that he was already unpersuaded. The little man’s name was Trevor Land, and his first cousin was some kind of power over at the law school, a former dean, but from what Bruce understood, Land’s real constituency was among alumni of a particular kind: the old-monied white kind. He was their champion, their man on key committees, their advocate in the political-correctness wars, and, at the worst moments, their spy. He was whispered to hold a veto over decisions ranging from the selection of a new university president to the siting of a new gym. Over the years he had held a dozen different positions around the campus, but always administrative, never academic. He was probably in his late sixties. With his tiny eyes and rimless spectacles and vested suits with gold watch chain, his delicate chin and soft, inept hands, he looked the part of the foppish time-server. His habit of mouthing nonsense words—Yes and Oh, no doubt and I see formed half his vocabulary—confirmed the impression. But Bruce, eighteen months into the job, knew already that Trevor Land was not a man to be trifled with.

  Once, a week or two after he started, Bruce had been summoned, much like today, and asked by Trevor Land to quash the DWI arrest of the daughter of a prominent alumnus. At that time Bruce had not yet figured out the nature of his work. He thought that he was still a policeman, not realizing that he was now a politician. So he pointed out that the arrest was by city, not campus cops, and thus out of his jurisdiction. The minute reptilian eyes, usually so sleepy, were, for just an instant, wide open, and Bruce was startled by the primitive cunning he saw there. And the power. Then the foppish façade closed down again. Well, yes, I see, if you think there’s nothing to be done, well, yes, I suppose I could go back and report that fact—the tone now dubious: sharing his dilemma, one man of the world to another. Only, you see, they’re accustomed to asking small favors. The alums, I mean, alums are the same everywhere, what? What’s the old line? Change is the enemy of memory. Yes. Alums like the status to remain rather quo, Chief Vallely. A small chuckle, as though this fancy was a joke between the two of them. Yes, well, what can one do? It’s their contributions, after all, on which we rely for our fiscal health. We’re not socialists, after all, are we? Private education requires private donation. So there we are. And, yes, well, I’m afraid that when they get crossed, Chief Vallely, they aren’t terribly happy, if you see what I mean. The alums. These little things, children, family, you know, are so important to them. A small, encompassing wave, as though to indicate Trevor Land’s understanding that every race has its families. Which of us doesn’t love his family, after all? And alcohol, well, high spirits, we all had our day, didn’t we? It’s not as though it’s murder or some such….

  Bruce, no fool, had gotten the message. He had smiled and nodded and said he would see what he could do, then returned to his office at the edge of campus, steaming, and read a couple of verses from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians to calm himself down. Then he had contacted friends over cityside, as it was known, called in a few favors, gotten the matter quashed. Felt dirty doing it, gave some thought to quitting—the principle of the thing—but Grace, still unaware of what was growing in her pancreas, was looking at new houses out in the beautiful subdivisions they were building in Norport these days, telling him happily that they needed a place befitting his new status, not knowing, because he would never burden her with the knowledge, that his status, on the campus, was about on the level of the people who cleaned the bathrooms, except that they had a union and he didn’t.

  All of which is to say that, although Bruce Vallely had no earthly idea what Trevor Land had in mind for him today, he knew to a moral certainty that he would hate it.

  He was right.

  (III)

  “JUST A LITTLE HIGH JINKS,” murmured Trevor Land, his eyes sleepy and unfocused. “Not a crisis, really, unless we allow others to make it one. You know how it is.”

  “I know how it is,” Bruce repeated, fuming, but only to himself.

  “These boys were just having fun. They weren’t involved in whatever else might have happened. Terrible business, but one must move on, mustn’t one? And look to the interests of the institution.”

  “Yes, sir.” Trevor Land enjoyed being sirred by underlings. “On the other hand, if they saw Professor Zant’s car that night near the hockey rink, that makes them witnesses.”

  “Witnesses. Sounds so formal, sort of thing. Not sure I care for it.” Lifting both hands to prove his innocence. “After all, we have our name to preserve, don’t we?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bruce repeated, “but the police have a murder investigation, with which President Carlyle has ordered me to cooperate in every way possible.”

  “And with which we are cooperating to the full. Oh, yes. But that’s my point, you see, Chief Vallely.” Bruce controlled his facial muscles. Grace had schooled him carefully not to bristle. Nobody but Trevor Land called him “Chief,” which was not his title, and which always sounded, in the secretary’s mouth, patronizing: a put-down, reminding him of where he stood. “That’s my point,” the little man repeated. “One has nothing to do with the other. These are good boys, Chief Vallely. Good boys. Know most of the parents.”

  “Earlier that night they were drinking in a bar, Mr. Secretary. From what you tell me, at least two of them are underage.” He hesitated but had to say it. “One or two of the names are familiar to me. Known troublemakers. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose one could put it that way. Breaking into the libraries and so forth.” Those innocent hands came up again, soft and pliable, uneasy with absolutes. “But on Friday night, Chief Vallely, they were only having a drink or two. That’s all.”

  Bruce assumed he would in the end be forced to yield, but he was not ready to go down without a fight. “It is against the law, sir. It is also dangerous.”

  “Well, yes, Chief Vallely, naturally, one wants the law enforced, students protected, and so forth. At the same time, Chief, one has to be a little bit understanding,” said
the secretary, suddenly the very soul of tolerance. “Not so many outlets these days for manly high spirits, Chief. Fraternities moribund, might as well be dead. One of them just voted to accept women, I hear, if you can imagine. Calls itself a ‘social club’ now.” His prim jaw made a chewing motion, although the pristine chamber offered no evidence that anyone had recently eaten, or was ever allowed to. Trevor Land raised a finger straight up, like a Roman statue, then lowered it slowly until he was pointing at himself. “Not that one is against the women. Join whatever they like, my view. Don’t happen to care for sexism, thanks very much. On the other hand, now and then, boys have to get together with other boys and let off a bit of steam. Harmlessly, Chief. Harmlessly.”

  The secretary paused, and, for a moment, each waited the other out, like poker players unsure of one another’s cards. When it became apparent that Bruce was prepared to sit all day, Trevor Land resumed his lecture.

  “Not easy being young, my view. Not if you’re a person of any quality. Best horse in the world needs to test his reins, Chief Vallely. Perfectly natural, providing nobody gets hurt, sort of thing. I did it. You did it. I daresay boys will always do it.”

  “Yes, sir, I quite agree. However—”

  The word agree was all the secretary wanted. The finger was pointing again, this time at Bruce’s hard chin. “Then you see how it is, Chief Vallely. Young men of high spirits, nothing more. But one can imagine, Chief, if the newspapers were to get wind of this, well, given the tragic events of last weekend”—he meant the murder—“one can see, of course, how it might easily be blown out of proportion. To our mutual damage, I might add. Tinderbox.” Folding his hands like the contrite if mischievous schoolboy he might once have been, Trevor Land concluded his sermon in a mournful tone. “As secretary of the university, Chief Vallely, I bear the heavy responsibility of protecting the reputation of our institution. You’re here to assist in that task, Chief. That’s why we brought you in.”